Belize Partners visit NOC Southampton for workshops

NOC Southampton hosted a week of workshops and meetings (25 – 29 March) to discuss progress and plan future collaboration with partners and stakeholders from Belize. The event was attended by representatives from Belize’s Coastal Zone Management Institute and Authority (CZMAI), Port Authority, the University of Belize (UB), and the Turneffe Atoll Sustainability Association (TASA), as well as from the UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO), the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS), and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO).

The week started with two workshops, looking at the data collected during the various water quality and seagrass ‘blue carbon’ field campaigns conducted since November. This was followed by a year-end programme meeting which was attended by 36 collaborators and included sessions on hydrological and oceanographic modelling, river and coastal water quality, seagrass ‘blue carbon’, and the Containerised Autonomous Marine Environmental Laboratory (CAMEL), along with reports from the wider CME partnership (UKHO and CEFAS). The week finished with a 1 day future planning meeting, developing future priorities and agreeing on actions for the coming year.

The NOC would like to thank all who attended, in particular our partners from Belize, without whom none of the work completed in the past 12 months would have been possible.